Keeping plants green...

Aquarists can be real weirdoes. Imagine you are a chemist working in a nuclear laboratory and you have an aquarium at home. Can you mix both? Perhaps not. But one bloke did just that in the US. Instead of paying fat packets of dough for keeping his aquarium plants green by using fertilizer tablets regularly, he put one of the tablets through a gas chromatograph. Voila! He had all the names of chemicals that go into the creation of the fertilizer tablet.

So what do we get out of it. A poor man's formula for keeping the plants green. It has potassium sulfate, potassium nitrate and hydrated magnesium sulphate and a mixture of eight trace elements.



All these compounds are available at shops that sell lab equipment and chemicals. Don't buy bags of these chemicals the cops will come knocking on your door (potassium nitrate is part of the gunpowder formula also). Buy 100 gm of these and use this formula to mix, keep and add to your aquarium. Use 20 gm of hydrated magnesium sulphate, 40 gm of potassium sulphate, 20 gm of potassium nitrate, 10 gm of trace element mix and mix it with 500 ml of warm water and store it in a cool place. After the cloudy mixture settles down, add two spoons of the stuff to your aquarium daily and see the plants bubble with life. Change the dosage depending on your needs.

If you think that you will step into a fertilizer store and save some trouble, don't do it. Fertilizers have urea, ammonia and phosphates. The first two will kill the fishes, phosphate will add to your algal agony.

The subject is treated in greater detail at http://www.thekrib.com/Plants/Fertilizer/pmdd-tim.html#roll.

~S.N.